Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels

It's often said that every author has at least one good book in him.
The unfortunate corollary to this rule is that remarkably few have more
than one. Even more rare are those blessed few who have several,
or, rarer still, many. This phenomenon combines with another, which
we'll call the "Acknowledged Classic Syndrome"--wherein a single one of
an author's books achieves Great Book status, frequently through being
assigned reading for grade schoolers--to create a tendency on most of our
part to only read one or two works by any given author. Thus, every
kid in America is forced to read Hamlet and A
Tale of Two Cities, but few of us ever feel compelled to seek out the
rest of even these great author's oeuvres. We're even less likely
to look past Lord of the Flies
for William Golding's other books or past Catcher
in the Rye for the rest, what there is of it, of Salinger.

George Orwell is "lucky" enough to have two books on the mandatory reading
list--Animal Farm and 1984--but, with the possible exception
of Homage to Catalonia, resurgent since the end of the Cold War,
much of his other work goes unread. As it happens, these three
most famous books showed up on various end-of-Century book lists, as did
his Collected Essays, and with every one I read I become more and
more convinced that he was the greatest writer of the 20th Century.
So at this point I'm consciously seeking out his other books, most recently
Coming
Up for Air, and my appreciation continues to grow.

Coming Up for Air begins with one of the most disarming and quintessentially
English sentences in all of literature :

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false
teeth.

The speaker is George "Fatty" Bowling, an insurance salesman, with a
wife he does not love and two children he finds annoying. The idea
is to take the seventeen pounds he almost accidentally won on a horse race
and to go visit Lower Binfield, the village in which he grew up and which
holds so many happy memories of youth and of a simpler England. The
story is set in 1938, the War approaching, and George's thoughts continually
drift back to the time before WWI :

1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green
water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come
again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again.
I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of
not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the
feeling you've either had and don't need to be
told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the
chance to learn.

And so he decides to try and recapture that scene of his youth
:

[I]t wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel.
I only wanted to get my nerve back before the bad
times begin. Because does anyone who isn't
dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time
coming ? We don't even know what it'll be,
and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps
a slump--no knowing, except that it'll be something
bad. Wherever we're going, we're going
downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no
knowing. And you can't face that kind of thing
unless you've got the right feeling inside you.
There's something that's gone out of us in these
twenty years since the war. It's a kind of
vital juice that we've squirted away until there's nothing
left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting
scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses,
bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn
all to bits, empty places in our bones where the
marrow out to be.

I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The
very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had
done me good already. You know the feeling
I had. Coming up for air!

But of course the village and the life he recalls are long since gone.

Orwell writes beautifully about the world that Lower Binfield represented
and with great disdain of the England that George currently occupies.
But his most devastating intuitions concern the world to come. In
the book's signal moment, George has gone to a Left Book Club meeting with
his wife to hear an anti-Fascist speaker. As the speaker drones on
:

I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture.
But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my
eyes for a moment. The effect was curious.
I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could
only hear his voice.

It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on
for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing,
really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting
propaganda at you by the hour. The same
thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate.
Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and
over. It gives you the feeling that something
has got inside your skull and is hammering down on
your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes
shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside
his skull. It was a peculiar sensation.
For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I
was him. At any rate, I felt what he
was feeling.

I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it
wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about.
What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us
and we must all get together and have a good hate.
Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable.
But what he's seeing is something quite
different. It's a picture of himself smashing
people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of
course. I know that's what he was seeing.
It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I
was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle!
The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a
face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry
jam. Smash! There goes another! That's
what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the
more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's
all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists.
You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.

There's much here that foreshadows 1984, from the idea of an
organized event called a "hate" to the image of the future consisting of
smashing peoples' faces--recall the chilling line : "If you want a picture
of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face--forever."

The term "Orwellian" is thrown about fairly freely, to the point where
it may have no fixed meaning. If anything, folks probably consider
it to refer to the concept of "Big Brother" or some authoritarian force
spying on us or oppressing us. But the truly Orwellian moments occur
not so much when these external forces are brought to bear, but when we
become their accomplices : when Winston Smith denounces Julia, when the
other animals help enforce the pigs rules at Animal Farm, and here, when
the theoretically benign anti-Fascist becomes a figure of terror himself.
This is Orwell's great insight, hard earned in the crucible of the Spanish
Civil War, that in the modern political world, where mere political differences
yield to hatred of the other, even those with the best intentions become
monstrous, their hatreds warping them until they are capable of horrific
acts.

Without taking anything away from Animal Farm or 1984,
Coming
Up for Air is perhaps an even more impressive novel. First of
all, it is a realist fiction--with all the restrictions which that entails--not
a fantasy. Second, where the other two books have the advantage of hindsight,
Coming
Up for Air is predictive. It correctly forecasts a world where
even the Allies, the putative "good guys," would find themselves shipping
citizens to concentration camps, fire bombing cities and finally resorting
to nuclear weapons. Smash! Smash! Smash! It is a great book.

Comments:

Coming Up for Air is, in my view, Orwell's finest book and sadly overlooked. It's especially pertinent at the moment, with everyone getting paranoid about the forthcoming 'terror' threat. One strange after effect of reading it, was that I - for the first time in my life - took an interest in angling - which Orwell makes sound very appealing - on a warm summers day, with a sandwich and not a worry in the world, except the buzzing of the insects

- Steve Yabsley

- Apr-24-2004, 05:11

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"Coming Up for Air" was required reading in a freshman college English course I took in 1973, thirty four years after its original publication. The ensuing years have done nothing to lessen the timeliness of this often overlooked gem. I agree whole heartedly with your review and rating.